Deep dive into Qlik Cloud And learn more about Automations
- by Michiel Hofsteenge
"Qlik Cloud saved my organization!" Of course, that is one of the best compliments you can get as an organization from a customer. Why this customer is so enthusiastic, I like to explain in my 7-part blog about the possibilities and content of Qlik Cloud. My name is Michiel Hofsteenge, Tech Lead Data Analytics at Cmotions and Qlik Cloud fanatic.
We can automate an awful lot these days. In the near future, this will only increase because of the smart techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since the advent of ChatGPT, we have been in a state of flux. A true arms race around the smartest and most advanced piece of technology that many see the added value of.
But there is also another side to the coin. Do we still trust what is happening? Will we not soon lose our own jobs? Does it make sense at all to automate certain things already? Many questions that can be asked when talking about Qlik Automations.
Qlik Automations may not be as comprehensive as ChatGPT, but the possibilities are (almost) endless. Find out what makes sense for you in this blog.
Blendr.io
Ever since Qlik announced the acquisition of Blendr.io, many a green heart beat faster. In no time, the product was integrated within Qlik Cloud and was renamed Qlik Automations. A tool that allows you to automate process flows through low-code/no-code. This means that without knowing much about code, you can click together very nice flows yourself. For the Microsoft fans among us, it is very similar to Power Automate.
When I look at the functionalities our customers use, two components really stand out. Those are scheduling reloading tasks and sending reports to external or internal users. In addition, you can let your imagination run wild about automating processes and it's probably possible with Qlik Automations.
Reload tasks
Task reloading is perhaps an unusual variation to read in a blog about Automations. Probably most developers would have expected a nice "taskchain" standard to be available at another level. Unfortunately, there isn't (yet). Looking at the way Qlik wants to position itself in the market, that may not be surprising either.
Scripting seems to be disappearing more and Data Integration is taking its place (read more about this in my blog on Qlik Connections). This eliminates the need to reload apps one after another. This is because the ETL (extract, transform, load) will be captured somewhere else. Nevertheless, many customers still use scripting. And because you can only control the switching of apps in Automations, this technique is therefore widely used.
Above is a simple outline of what that looks like in Qlik Automations. Each automation starts with a start. This can be set at fixed times, but can also be triggered after an action from another app(license). Think of a button in an app until something in an ERP package is completed. Then the first reload is started. If it is completed successfully, the next reload task may start.
Reporting
Not every employee has the time, knowledge, or capabilities to look into Qlik every day. But customers are also eager for reports from time to time. Sharing data both within your organization and beyond can be enormously valuable moving forward. To still get this data to certain stakeholders, sending reports can make tremendous sense. In Qlik Cloud, this is called Reporting Services and is part of Qlik Automations.
Fundamentally, I am not in favor of sending around all Excel files to employees of your organization. However, there are situations where this is actually necessary. Always think of a good plan on how to minimize the use of Excel with data from Qlik. A strategy on data literacy could be part of this. Should the situation arise that an employee does receive a report via reporting, then at least it is well thought out how and why that happens.
Data within Qlik can be shared. On one side, we have subscribing to visualizations (which I will come back to in the last blog). On the other hand, there is Reporting Services there. This gives just a little more flexibility and who and how someone receives the data. So you can send a report to each employee where each employee receives a different report and you still only have to set up one report.
Manage all your automations through monitoring
Since a few weeks we can finally do some monitoring. Here you can keep good track of which reload task has run and at what time. In the context of active intelligence, you don't want to have to look in your monitoring dashboard every time. Therefore, we often set up that an email is sent at the end of an automation that did not run successfully. Should you want to check if the last run was successful, what time it happened etc. Then use your monitoring.
The next blog, and thus part 6 of 7, is about AutoML in Qlik. A piece of machine learning that allows you to predict the future from your data.
